Enlarge / AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Nearly a year and a half after the launch of the first Ryzen 5000 processors, the Zen 3 CPU architecture is finally coming to cheaper chips.
AMD’s Ryzen 5 5500 and 5600 CPUs (which go on sale today for $159 and $199, respectively) are both six-core 12-thread processors aimed squarely at mid-range, price-conscious PCs used for gaming and photo and video editing. The new Ryzens significantly undercut the original $299 asking price of the Ryzen 5 5600X (the 5600X was, for many months, the cheapest way to get Zen 3). And the CPUs finally provide a replacement for the last-gen $199 Ryzen 5 3600.
But the new chips have stiff competition in Intel’s Core i5-12400 processor ($210-ish with an integrated GPU, $180-ish without one). Intel’s desktop CPUs were saddled with the aging Skylake architecture and/or the aging 14nm manufacturing process for